The impact of environmental changes, current economic climate, and governmental pressures to reduce energy demands and greenhouse gas emission will force manufacturers to explore energy reductions on the plant floor. Generally, industrial energy consumption is impacted by two major variables—environmental changes and production output. Environmental changes (e.g., air temperature, humidity, time of day, and so forth) on facilities' energy consumption can be measured, trended, and controlled through energy tracking software and building automation systems. Production output's impact on energy consumption is generally estimated and not measured.
Currently, there are no direct incentives on the plant floor to reduce energy consumption since energy consumption is not measured against production volumes. Rather, energy costs are fixed allocations (generally, cost estimated at per month per square foot). Advances in automation can allow manufactures to make better production decisions based on energy availability, real time pricing, and emission caps but it does not go far enough. Moreover, various products and solutions provide energy and emission management from the facility or macro infrastructure (e.g., substations, switchgears, emission monitors). These tools apply production related information against the overall facility energy data to infer energy performance. Others focus energy and emission management on a building management level e.g., Data Centers, lighting, chiller and boilers.
To deal with current and future energy demand management issues, much more data relating to energy will need to become available. However, energy monitoring today is done at the facility level. Understanding energy usage patterns is accomplished by reviewing the logged data for obvious discrepancies or trends in consumption. The current demand management systems are nothing more than infrastructure max capacity load shedding applications. Newer systems may include the ability to transfer to on-site generation with auxiliary diesel or natural gas generators. Unfortunately, a general lack of energy information from production and utilities makes true demand management decisions impossible in today's environment.